Walkabout

City Island walking tour

Last week, I went on a walk around City Island that was sponsored by a group called Elastic City. Elastic City walks are not tours. They are conceptual, experiential walks. Each walk is led by a different artist. If you go on an Elastic City walk, do not expect someone to point to a building and tell you that Blah McBlah was the architect, it was built in 1921, and please notice the interesting cornices.

To get to City Island, I took the No. 6 train uptown, past dreamlike-sounding stops such as Zerega and Buhre Avenues. At some point in the Bronx, the subway car emerged from the tunnel and slowly crept along a rickety, curving old elevated track. I rode to the last stop, where I got off and soon thereafter met my fellow-explorers and our leader, Andrea Polli, at our designated meeting place.

Next, we boarded the Bx29 bus, to City Island. When we arrived, Andrea, who had just returned from New Zealand, led us in a hui: a Maori assembly. We introduced ourselves to one another and then walked to a wooden dock. A man in an undershirt said, “Watch out for the missing floorboards.”

At the end of the dock, Andrea had us do a few ear-cleaning exercises. First, we had to be quiet for a full minute. Then she told us to focus on the loudest sound we could hear. I heard water slapping loudly against some rocks behind me.

Then we had to focus on the softest sound. Birds, far away.

Then we were told to listen to random sounds. I heard a basketball bouncing on asphalt and a little girl shouting something I couldn’t make out. I also heard a dog barking incessantly inside a nearby house.

Next, Andrea told us to pair up. Each duo would walk down the street, one with his or her eyes closed, the other with eyes open, and then switch places. If you feel like doing this, here’s a tip: crouch low, so when you trip over a tree root you’re closer to the ground.

We came to the end of the listening part of our walk. Our ears were now fully open. Next, it was time to become more smell-sensitive. Andrea took out a lemon and cut it into wedges. We passed the wedges around to “cleanse our palates.” Then we were sent out into the field to smell what we could smell. I smelled the hollow of a tree, which in a children’s book might have been Mr. Squirrel’s house. It had a fresh-dirt smell.

I smelled juniper berries, which were peppery, and a little pine tree that was very piney. I smelled an American flag attached to someone’s fence: nothing.

I went into a junk store that was selling old LPs, trays of costume jewelry, paperbacks, ceramic doodads, worn-out casserole dishes—the usual. I pretended to examine the merchandise as I quietly sniffed. Everything I smelled had that old, damp, moldy smell.

We reconvened in a park and swapped smell stories. Someone had smelled someone’s garbage. He said it smelled like corn. We had definitely all become more smell-aware.

The next assignment was to observe interactions between people, between people and pets, and between people and objects. I ran into a parrot named Dino, who was getting a little fresh air in his cage outside a café. His owner told me that he was twenty-six, and that you could see him getting a shower on YouTube. Here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflE-a0xp2w. I observed that I was falling for Dino, and that Dino was used to people falling for him. I showed the owner some photos of my pet parrots at home. When I left, Dino said, “Bye-bye.”

Our walk was almost over. The final stop was a little garbage-strewn bit of shore, where we sat on logs or rocks. Andrea passed around a Talking Stick and asked us if we had any specific hopes or dreams for the future of America. Then someone tossed the stick into the water, and we were done. ♦

Roz Chast’s work first appeared in the pages of the The New Yorker in 1978, and the magazine has continually published her work since then.